The present invention relates generally to tracking user activity in online transactions and more specifically to tracking user selection of one or more active links.
Tracking a user's activity can be important for managing different transactions. For example, with multiple users, it may be beneficial to track where different users traverse within different web sites. This tracking may be used to better design and layout a web site, as well as monitor how the user is using the web site or responding to various advertising approaches.
In another example, it is important to know from where users linked into the particular web site. There currently exists known universal resource locator (URL) tracking techniques that monitor how a person accesses a particular web site. These techniques provide for referral allocation, such as found within advertising on a secondary web page, e.g. a search engine. In one technique, an active URL may include the URL portion for the intended web site and a secondary portion having a reference identifier. In this technique, when a user selects the active hyperlink, the destination web site parses off the second portion for tracking information.
In a further technique, the URLs within the destination web page may also be dynamically created to include the reference information. In this technique, when a user selects one of the links on the destination page, any further web pages within the web site will also include a reference identifier. This may be advantageous for tracking referral fees for any subsequent online purchases.
The existing techniques are limited because the tracking information is available only to the destination web site. Once a user selects the active hyperlink, the linking activity information may be stored on computers associated with the destination web site, but these links are also only customizable as allowed by the referring web site. For example, if the referring web site is a search engine, any customization by the target web site with URLs or tracking information may be problematic because the target web site would require the search engine to adjust its encoding. In systems having multiple advertisers and with companies having multiple advertising campaigns, tracking all this information is not only cumbersome, but is also readily error prone.
With the growth of web activities, companies may employ multiple different web sites under multiple URLS. While these sites may include a fair amount of common information, it is possible to even further personalize these web sites for particular users. One approach is using different URLs and directing different users to different URLs. For example, a company may sell pet food and wish to direct dog lovers to a dog food web site and cat lovers to a cat food web site. In existing systems, the referring web site would have to either include both referring URLs or require the user to select one or the other, or the referring web site would have to know the user's pet preference for either a cat or a dog.
The above example is also limited based on only two different pet food options. Scenarios exist where there are a significant number of options, such as with professional sports teams. These techniques are applicable to directed advertising approaches. Although, these techniques may be ineffective when using referring active links and tracking of user information through these referring sites because the referring site does not necessarily provide the user with the appropriate URL based on the referring sites lack of proper knowledge of which URL to present to the user.